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Going over to Rob’s house offered me a few precious minutes or hours of respite. It felt effortless and light, a completely levelheaded sex arrangement. We regularly patted each other on the back for being the world’s chillest sidepieces. Of course, despite its lack of histrionics, my relationship …

Not long before my dad’s stroke, Aaron had told me he wanted to slow the open relationship way down—I was hooking up with too many people for his liking, he explained, and he wanted to be able to catch up to me. Again, I thought that was crap, but I suspected that if I said what I really wanted, we…

In the early eighties, not long after she wrote those words, my mom fell in love with my dad, Stanley Aronowitz, in precisely this beat-the-system way. A political organizer and socialist professor, Stanley had read a book review of Ellen’s and was so impressed that he asked Rosalyn Baxandall, a ra…

In an essay called “The Family: Love It or Leave It,” from 1979, my mother characterized the six years she spent without a partner in her thirties as “neither an accident nor a deliberate choice,” but rather evidence of feminism’s success: “The sense of possibility, of hope for great changes, that …

And then, at the tail end of 1973, when she’d just turned thirty-two, Ellen initiated a breakup with Steve. He remembers it not as one defining incident—although their fights were at times acutely painful—but as a result of her amorphous desire for freedom and solitude. It wasn’t a clean break. She…